When Richard Nixon, the beleaguered president of the United States, called his right-hand man, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, to the White House's Lincoln Sitting Room on the evening of August 7, 1974, it was with some desperation. Embroiled in the Watergate scandal, he had no one left to turn to. The meeting resulted in Nixon's resignation. Russell Lees's clever, often funny, play condenses their conference to 90 minutes of frantic self-analysis, during which Nixon and Kissinger try to find a way of vouchsafing a respectable place in history.
As well as bearing an uncanny resemblance to their characters, both actors give a masterful display of bravado and nervous wit. One moment, Keith Jochim's Nixon is all big mouth and blubber, strutting the stage, delivering bolshie one-liners ("I appeal to the Richard Nixon in everybody"); the next, he's lumbering like a lost boy, clumsy and round-shouldered in defeat.
Tim Donohue as Kissinger, the German Jewish immigrant, is equally captivating, and his deliberate pronunciation means that his every sentence sounds at best like moralising, and at worst like a condemnation of the president. Yet his ponderous demeanour and fastidiousness with words are the perfect foil to the president's strident slang. Not only that, Kissinger cannot afford to tarnish his reputation if he is to retain his post under the incoming president, Gerald Ford, and Donohue's delivery weighs every word in terms of the damage it might do.
Although a political play about power and vulnerability could be rather static with the loaded dialogue and a cast of only two, Nixon's Nixon is saved by the quality of the writing and acting, and by an oft-repeated and wonderful device by means of which the two politicians impersonate the great leaders they have had successful dealings with. Jochim's Nixon is brilliant playing the saggy jowls and seriousness of Brezhnev, while Donohue's Kissinger (minus the Groucho Marx glasses) plays Chairman Mao "being inscrutable all over the place". Nixon then does a death-defying Napoleon, and even considers taking on the Pope.
Of course, this admiration for great leaders (a kind of hubris by proxy) returns to his own failings (and the despairing acknowledgment of the hundreds of thousands killed in Vietnam and Cambodia under his presidency). As the evening advances, and the brandy recedes, Nixon finally accepts that his last heroic gesture will be to do the honourable thing.
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